World of Warcraft: Cataclysm To Launch Dec. 7th 431
Blizzard announced today that the third expansion to World of Warcraft, dubbed Cataclysm, is set for launch on December 7th. In addition to upping the level cap to 85 and including several new high level zones, the expansion will revamp the parts of Azeroth that have been around since WoW's initial launch, bringing the 1-60 leveling experience more in line with the improvements Blizzard has made in the expansions. Cataclysm will also give players two new races to play, Goblins and Worgen, who have joined the Horde and the Alliance, respectively.
Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I started with MUDs, moved on to Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest, etc...I absolutely LOVED my time spent with MMOs, especially WoW (closed and open betas, continued until about 1.5 years after launch), but the genre got boring for me. Not even The Old Republic can get me excited about an MMO.
I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW. Anyone on here still playing since launch? What's kept you with it all this time? Gameplay, community, what?
OCD? :P (Score:4, Interesting)
OCD? ;)
Well, now seriously, I don't know anyone who actually played non-interrupted since start. The longest I know someone playing in a row is like 3 years, which admittedly is still a lot, but still not quite since start.
What most of us do is really play one game, play and eventually get bored, move to another game, played and eventually get bored, and so on. Not even all MMOs. There'll be lots of falling back to single player games in between MMOs.
I mean, technically I've started WoW relatively soon after it got launched in Europe myself, but, good grief, not continuously. In fact, the vast majority of these years I was _not_ on WoW at all. Ditto for other games. Actually my all time favourite MMO is City Of Heros, not WoW, but, you guessed, it's been actually a lot of not being on COH either.
At any rate, I'll probably have a look on WoW when cataclysm launches. Or maybe not. But it's not like, you know, a marriage or a job or swearing allegiance to a new king. It's a game. You play it until you've seen all the quests that are easy to get to, maybe try again with a different character or three, but eventually that's it.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or I could just play Team Fortress 2, which I got as part of a 5-game pack for $50 that has no monthly fee*.
Since my community [ocrtf2.com] runs it own servers, we turn AllTalk on, although that does make it harder to coordinate things as a team.
* However, since I've clocked over 800 hours (prolly over 900 by now, over 1800/1900 if you count idle time for items back when that worked), I did spend the $50 on the item pack Valve recently added. I can afford to give then some money to continue adding new things to the game.
Now, if Valve would only give me a Mann Co. Supply Crate, I'd give them even more money! (They cost $2.49 for the key to open one.)
No mention of flying? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:OCD? :P (Score:3, Interesting)
You play it until you've seen all the quests that are easy to get to, maybe try again with a different character or three, but eventually that's it.
The Heirlooms that they introduced with Wrath, and are continuing with Cata, have put an interesting spin on this, actually. Your main character's efforts can now directly result in alts leveling faster through the content you've already seen. There's XP in the battlegrounds now, too, and PvP heirlooms make that a lot easier to get into.
Everyone I know has several alts. Many of whom reached max level during this last xpac. This did used to happen in the past, true, but not to the degree we see it today.
Also, the optional RealID system means you can play on another server and/or faction without anyone wondering if you've quit the game...
Re:Anyone know the policy on updates? (Score:2, Interesting)
I haven't played WoW in a long time, not since Burning Crusade. So I missed WotLK.
If I restart my subscription now, and buy WotLK (so I have the most recent content available) do I have to pay again to get Cataclysm? If that's true it probably makes sense to do some catching up using Burning Crusade then wait for Cataclysm... assuming that option is still open.
Apologize in advance if this is obvious to anyone. Thanks.
The changes to the old world (Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms)/old zones will not require any expansion. You could play the original WoW only and be stuck at 60, but you could still go to the changed zones.
However, the two new races (Goblins and Worgen), the new zones, the levels 81-85 require the Cataclysm expansion. Archaeology may require it too (new secondary profession).
Your stock price? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, what's funny about that is that last year I bought some Activision Blizzard stock (ATVI on NASDAQ). I had a little leftover money, and I figured that with such a strong release schedule for 2010, there must have been room for growth in the stock. And guess what's happened - the stock is currently down from where I bought it, from about $11.70 at this point last year to about $11.00 today.
This despite the fact that ATVI has been profitable, has lots of cash on hand with no debt, has good releases in the pipe. They've even recently implemented a dividend to try and help with that staggering stock price (which will pay out around 1.5% of the stock price early next year, and I'm quite happy for it since it's at least a small ROI). On the one hand, the stock is largely following the market, so its price won't go up much until the larger market goes up, but the stock has also had a few tumbles apart from the market average that it never recovered from. What's crazy is that the price tumbled just after SC2 came out in part because of a company announcement stating that their quarter 2 earnings weren't going to beat expectations. Huge worldwide release of a long-awaited game apparently meant nothing against a lackluster earnings statement for a quarter with no major releases.
I'm sure your stock price thing was just sort of a flippant comment, but I wanted to mention this since it's been weird following the stock for a year. It's actually taught me a valuable lesson about buying individual stocks - you're told to trade in stocks where you know something about the company, something about the industry, so that you can predict how the price will move, but knowledge about the company doesn't always translate into knowledge about the market.
Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer (Score:3, Interesting)
From my experience too, on returning after a hiatus to find the gear score thing in place (and my character still being pretty well end-raid geared (ulduar 25/tournament 25), it seemed that the people demanding the really high gearscores and pre-completed raids didn't meet their own requirements - ie, they just wanted boosting.
I'll still never forget being turned away from a Karazan badge farming run on my 6/8 T6 mage with Sunwell off pieces for "too little spell power". Perhaps it was because I wasn't 8/8 - the sunwell pieces were better than the equivalent T6.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Played since launch, but not continuously. After it came out, I played for 6 months or so, then quit. A while after WotLK came out, I started up again for another four months. That was a year ago. I started again last month, because I wanted to be around when Cataclysm came out. After I get to 85, I'll probably do some raiding, remember that I got totally burned out in Blackwing Lair in classic, and quit again.
Basically, it's worth it to come back and see what's changed, but once you've done everything, it's kind of pointless. Sure, you can start a new class, but that's always felt like a chore to me. I wish they were adding a new hero class, as it's really nice to skip the 1-55 grind with the Death Knight.
Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not voluntary on Starcraft II. You can't create multiple characters, or even ever change your one character's name.
That and every time I start the game there's my real name in bold 24 point letters and this macro-lens close up of this real ugly guy. And links to Facebook. Most of the time the game shows videos you can't turn off of cigarette smoking. Gross. Made me really not want to play it.
I returned it for a refund.
My guess is that somebody at that company is trying to turn it into a social networking business and couldn't care less about making a product their customers want. The main point of games, for many of us, is to forget the real world for a bit.
Re:Your stock price? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm suspecting Cataclysm is going to be a commercially disappointing expansion for WoW. I've been a WoW player since the original, and I'm not getting Cata. In fact, my subscription expires in a couple of days and I have no plans to renew.
Cataclysm has some major issues that are going to interfere with its commercial success. Healing specs are being nerfed very hard, to the point that playing a healer in PvE is not going to be fun for many players, and playing a healer in PvP will be even worse. Expect many players with healing mains to bail out. The PvE content is being made more difficult. While that may make the hardcore fringe happy, for the typical WoW player it only adds frustration. And remember, most of these player never finished the normal mode PvE content in WotLK; even that was too hard for them. The popular random LFD feature is going to be a wasteland.
Tremendous changes, larger than in any previous expansion, are being made to all classes and specs. It is unlikely these will be balanced adequately until well into the expansion, if then.
It doesn't take many defections from your circle of close in-game friends before you begin to question why you're still playing the game. When the stuff really hits the fan in after the next several months, SW:tOR will be coming along to snatch up the disgruntled.
If Cataclysm lives up to its name, I expect ATVI stock to take a considerable hit.
Re:Your stock price? (Score:4, Interesting)
The stock market is highly correlated nowadays. With everyone using computers for analysis and such almost all the stocks move in unison. There is almost no point in buying individual stocks any more. If it weren't for dividends then it probably wouldn't be worth buying anything other than an index stock (like SPY or whatever).
Kind of sad actually (I say this as a day trader). Not sure how to "fix" it though. The market has turned almost completely into a short-term game.
Re:It's about time (Score:1, Interesting)
They were in kind of an awkward spot, with Blizzcon coming up soon. They seem to take about 2 months to plaster the internet with ads for a new game/expansion once it's been announced. Announcing it at Blizzcon would have put a release uncomfortably close to Christmas.
Maybe this means they'll give us more Diablo 3 information instead...
Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that (Score:4, Interesting)
The spec-swapping will be quite a bit easier this time around, for most classes anyway. Druids, for example, can Tree or Boomkin in the exact same gear - talents will convert spirit into hit automagically. Likewise, glyphs can be changed on the fly as they're going to be a part of your spellbook now. Same for many others as well. So maybe Blizzard assumes that people will just shift their roles around more often.
There was a conversation about the carnage this would wreak on the Dungeon Finder system, and IIRC the Blue response was basically 'Meh'.
Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer (Score:4, Interesting)
Not trying to be argumentative, but you're looking at the pug requirements from the wrong angle.
The underlying problem I have here is an ethical one. And to be completely honest, it is the same thing that gives me pause about the 'hardcore' level of play.
In order to get that gear, those achievements, etc, time must be invested. Someone, somewhere has to lead that player through that content, show them the ropes, carry them somewhat, and so on. This means that someone gave them a chance and let them into the raid.
Fast-forward to the guy setting up a pug, or reviewing a guild application, who is looking at this material. He (or she) is planning to profit by this effort, by not needing to expend it themselves. Because of the way raid lockouts and guild membership works, they are necessarily doing this at the expense of those that DID invest the time on them.
Now, half of the time the person in question is a truly unpalatable type that didn't quit the guild but got ejected. Gearscore won't tell you that, and that is a tiny bit of shadenfreude in way of consolation. But the other half of the time players that set these requirements are profiting off of the players like myself, and they often take the time to insult me for my efforts.
Just sad, really.
Re:Expect a Worgen Crush during December (Score:3, Interesting)
No, certain classes use LW for armor. I predict an uptick in that, and an increase in BASE skinning low-level mats, but NOT in the supplementary mats for LW - so look at the crafting requirements for LW and if it isn't a result of skinning, stockpile it (those will be in high demand).
Markets are not uniform. It's the friction points that have the greatest profit, so expect skinning/LW demand for non-skinning mats for LW crafting to increase.
Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that wasn't a major reason.
I thought it was a bit odd. No other software I've ever used puts my full legal name (not my email, handle, etc) in big bold letters on the main screen.
No, I was previously aware of my own name.
Yes, but I didn't feel like I had a good understanding of just how much of the game I would be sacrificing if I declined to participate. My experience is that choosing privacy (i.e., opting out of information sharing) tends to make one something of a second-class citizen when the product or service is heavily oriented to an online community. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but I got the sense that Blizzard was really pushing for me to give in to RealID friend sharing and I would end up missing out on a significant part of the game's experience.
I don't really know if this counts as offended, but it just looks gross to me. When I was younger, people in my family would smoke cigarettes, and I developed chronic bronchitis. It gives me a dizzy shudder to smell it or sometimes even think about it. Some people will instantly relate to this, others won't at all.
Sometimes I feel like the last guy on the planet without a Facebook account, but I'm pretty sure I would remember having signed up for it. Not sure how I could prove that negative (that I didn't turn on Facebook), nor am I really going to try.
What I'm saying is that, to me, the game startup screen felt like loading a web page with affiliate links. I see enough of that during the day to enjoy at more of it at night. I get tired visually of filtering out corporate logos. Here's [pcmag.com] a link to the startup screen in beta. To this they added my legal name, and the character name in big bold letters. As well as prominent/frequent invitations to associate my real identity on Facebook. Take a look at the WoW startup screen, it doesn't have any of that. If they ever added banner ads and affiliate links, I'd probably stop playing.
No, absolutely, those on their own would be silly reasons to not play a game, and the actual gameplay didn't suck. As I said, the main reason I returned the game was because, after spending $60 on the thing, I was forbidden from ever changing my character name and I felt like that wasn't made clear to me at the time that I purchased it.
Hypothetically speaking, if you want me to be a customer and pay $60 for a game, and I say "No thanks, it turns out not to be enjoyable to me because I find your policies about identity to be heavy-handed and I'm not exactly in love with some of its other aesthetic qualities" then it's not really useful to anyone for you to argue back. I'm not under an obligation to be logical about what I like and don't like. The game (particularly the character name thing) wasn't what I thought it would be. Nothing personal.
Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people quit during the "RealID" debacle and didn't return. They had all kinds of reasons, but they needed a catalyst.
One big reason, though, is that a lot of players are burned out. While I realize that not everybody reached that point, it's pretty common to have gotten to the point where there's not really anything to get that is meaningful to your character. I reached that point with the 10-man game a long time ago, and my motivation to go further in the 25-man game decreases with the amount of downright hostile and antisocial behavior that I run into every time I join or form a group.
I played the Cata beta and enjoyed the Worgen starting zone, but I don't see the things in Cata that would hook me.
What I really wanted (expected) to see was a great deal more character customization possibility, even world customization, something like I imagine if Second Life and World of Warcraft had a baby. Instead of your character's avatar being defined by its gear, it could be completely customized (or maybe customized with a range of provided textures and shapes, in order to maintain some consistency of the theme). Instead of a few dungeons, there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of player-designed dungeons. Instead of a segmented world with a few thousand players in the same gameplay universe as you, there could be one really huge interconnected world so that your options weren't so limited.
It's a real problem when you need a 25 man team, on a server with maybe 1500 characters who can run the content, who already have 40 guilds competing for them. It actually becomes extremely (artificially!) difficult to put a group together.
Cataclysm brings nothing to the table to fix any of the problems in the game, and doesn't bring anything that can be characterized as new or innovative except maybe in marketing terms. Of course that wasn't its purpose. Blizzard needs to do something to drive a few quarters of growth in order to keep the interest of investors. Sure, Blizz has a ton of subscribers but that makes them a parking place for money, not really an attractive investment. Entertainment companies are really not a great place to park money, they are a place to risk money if you think you're betting on growth.
Cataclysm, SC2, and some of the Activision console offerings should provide a couple of quarters of growth for the company, but Cata isn't exactly breathing new life into WoW.
Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't pay much attention, do ya? Real ID isn't required, period, just a Battle.net login, which isn't the same thing. You don't have to share your Battle.Net login with anyone, thus they can't find you unless you willingly give it out - Blizzard is putting the responsibility for your safety and privacy in your hands, where it belongs.
Sorry dude, but they failed to put it in my hands from the start, otherwise people wouldn't have been able to use friends of friends for the same info, and they would have had "No, I don't want to opt into Real ID" as a basic part of the process from the start. Combine with their idea of using real names on the forums fiasco, and well, I'm not trusting them to keep it in my hands.
That's the whole point. They had a chance to do things right. To even show they wanted to do it right, and would fix it. They failed to convince me they would.
Pardon me for not wanting any of that. Apparently that's some great sin, but I'm going to stand by it. They lost me.
Blizzard gains about 20 new customers for every one that quits - so, please, continue to quit - my stock price keeps going up.
A) Fix your sarcasm detector
B) False correlation
Re:Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty much anything else. Most games don't attempt to influence the behavior of the player outside of the game, because they don't provide consequences for *not* playing. There's no consequence for not playing, say, Tetris for a month, while doing the same in WoW (or other MMORPGs) will lead to the disintegration of the social network, be it through apathy or necessity on the part of one's "friends", required for all but the most trivial of tasks, relegating one to the oft-maligned (and justly so) "pickup group". Additionally, the state of Tetris fails to advance in your absence, so you're not missing anything by not playing. The same is actually true of WoW over a sufficient timespan, but it's cleverly disguised though reduced requirements to "catch up" to everyone else, which are meted out in annual or semi-annual doses -- long enough to discourage waiting, but sufficient for anyone who's starting fresh or returning after a hiatus. For many people, the innate desire for instant gratification precludes waiting 6 months to resume playing after a 1 week break (family vacation, business travel, whatever), so they jump back in, work twice as hard, and try their damndest not to miss another week.